Odd René Andersen Odd René Andersen (2019)

Guests on the CD: Swedish Clarinetist virtuoso Legend Putte Wickman (his last recorded performance), Sax Man Petter Wettre, Trombonist Frode Thingnes, Trumpet Virtuoso Ole Edvard Antonsen, and Vocalists Scandinavian entertainment Legend Grethe Kausland, Odd Rene Andersen, Yngvar Numme, Vinni and Joran Fristorp.

The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

Rene de Bakker is an electronic artist, also known from Beyond Berlin. At age of 15, he became interested in symphonic rock bands and synthesizers used by them. But it was Timewind by Klaus Schulze that made him wanting to play a synthesizer. Beside Schulze, Rene was influenced by all great electronic music of that time like Tangerine Dream, Tomita, Synergy and Vangelis. With this heavy Berlin School influenced release the sequences rule. Rene's first release on Groove is an solid mature release that will be liked by any who love the big Berlin Sound!